Brand Identity Examples: Paul Rand Sketches NeXT

It’s odd to think that one of the greatest graphic designers would advocate the need to explain his work, but that’s one of the tenets that Paul Rand advocated as part of the process and one that he felt was perhaps the most difficult for designers. In his book, Design, Form, and Chaos, Rand says, “Canned presentations have the ring of emptiness. The meaningful presentation is custom designed–for a particular purpose, for a particular person. How to present a new idea is, perhaps, one of the designer’s most difficult tasks”.

He called the presentation “the musical accompaniment of design.”

In 2011, Steven Heller wrote about Rand’s working with Steven Jobs on the NeXT logo in his book Design Dialogues. What I appreciate most about Heller’s book is this brilliant exchange, “Actually, I assumed that Steve Jobs, the founder of NeXT and the man behind the Apple computer, liked cute things, like the Apple logo in rainbow colors with a bite taken out of it. I was told that the reason it was called Apple was that Jobs challenged his staff to come up with an idea — and nobody did — so he decided upon the apple, for no other reason than he liked them. This is a classic example of how arbitrary symbols and logos are — or should be.”

Like a presentation, the story behind a designer’s work makes it all the more rich and interesting. Jason Adam and Tim Lapetino, partners at Hexanine, a design firm that focuses on brand identity and works to promote brand stories, has cultivated projects from top designers, firms and creative teams from around the globe and published them in their book Damn Good.

The collection includes narratives on brand identity examples and creative inspiration, pushing boundaries and sourcing material for all forms of design including logo, package, print, branding, web and more.